Christopher Tozzi at IT Pro Today writes about how Windows and Linux worlds are coming closer. “Once upon a time, the world of developers was split into two halves: One half was composed of Windows developers, who created most of the productivity apps that powered PCs (and, occasionally, servers). The other half comprised Linux and Unix developers, whose work focused on server-side development. Today, however, as the worlds of Windows and Linux move ever closer together, the distinction between Windows and Linux developers is disappearing. Gone are the days when you had to specialize in one ecosystem or the other.”

The White House in 2016 required every agency to make at least 20 percent of its custom software available for reuse across the government, but the Pentagon isn’t even halfway there, according to the Government Accountability Office. The Defense Department is not abiding by a federal mandate to promote the use of open source software and make common code more readily available to other agencies, according to the Government Accountability Office. The department has also failed to fully implement a number of other open source software initiatives required by the OMB memo, such as creating an enterprisewide open source software policy and building inventories of custom code, auditors said. Additionally, officials never created performance metrics to measure the success of their open source software efforts. (Source: Next Gov)

Linux is built on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML) and numerous other more specialized development mailing lists. But email and Internet Relay Chat (IRC) can only get you so far. Sometimes, to get things done, top Linux programmers really need to talk face-to-face with each other. That’s where the Kernel Maintainers Summit and Linux Plumbers comes in. The Kernel Maintainers Summit, Linux ceator Linus Torvalds told me, is an invitation-only gathering of the top Linux kernel developers. But, while you might think it’s about planning on the Linux kernel’s future, that’s not the case. “The maintainer summit is really different because it doesn’t even talk about technical issues.” Instead, “It’s all about the process of creating and maintaining the Linux kernel.” (Source: ZDNet, SJVN)

IBM has buried the hatchet between Red Hat and Cloud Foundry by bringing its Cloud Foundry Enterprise Environment to Red Hat’s OpenShift container platform. Tech Crunch reports that “this work is still officially still a technology experiment, but our understanding is that IBM plans to turn this into a fully supported project that will give Cloud Foundry users the option to deploy their application right to OpenShift, while OpenShift customers will be able to offer their developers the Cloud Foundry experience.”

Scott Gilbertson at Ars Technica reviews the latest release of Debian. He wrote: “Debian is always a tough distro to get excited about because, while there’s a ton of new things in this release, most of these updates long ago arrived in nearly every other distro. Debian releases look like the distro is playing catch-up with the rest of the Linux world. And in some ways, that’s exactly what’s happening.

This time around, though, it feels like there’s more to the new Debian release than that. Most of the major updates in Debian 10 involve security in one way or another, making Buster feel a bit like “Debian, hardened.”

Broad deployment of Cloud Foundry has nearly doubled in just the last two years, according to the latest report released by Cloud Foundry Foundation, home to open source projects helping build the future of cloud applications. The study was released at the Foundation’s European Cloud Foundry Summit in The Hague. It revealed that 45 percent of user respondents describe their Cloud Foundry use as “broad” compared to 30 percent in 2018 and 24 percent in 2017. Furthermore, 39 percent of developers are deploying applications in less than one day. Nearly one in five respondents started using the platform in just the last 12 months, indicating a healthy and growing community of developers. (Source: e3zine)

Ballerina has announced a new open source project created and sponsored by WSO2, which radically simplifies how developers will build and deploy cloud native distributed applications and services. Ballerina 1.0, which is available under the Apache License, is being announced in conjunction with ApacheCon North America 2019. Ballerina, an ApacheCon Gold Sponsor, will offer technical sessions and demos of the new Ballerina release at the event. WSO2 CTO Paul Fremantle will also hold a session on Tuesday, September 10 at 2:30 p.m., “Ballerina – Re-inventing Middleware in a Programming Language.” ApacheCon North America 2019 is being held September 9-12, 2019 at the Flamingo in Las Vegas, Nevada. (Source: Yahoo!)

The Eclipse Foundation today announced during the JakartaOne Livestream virtual conference the release of the Jakarta EE 8 Full Platform and Web Profile specifications and related Technology Compatibility Kits (TCKs). This release provides a new baseline for the evolution and innovation of enterprise Java technologies under an open, vendor-neutral, community-driven process. As a result, Java vendors, developers, and customers alike now have a foundation for migrating mission-critical Java EE applications and workloads to a standard enterprise Java stack for a cloud native world. (Source: Financial Buzz)

Israel open source security platform developer Snyk has raised $70 million led by Accel and with the participation of previous investors GV and Boldstart Ventures. In its previous financing round last September, the company raised $22 million at a company valuation of $100 million, a source told “Techcrunch” at the time. (Source: Globes)